


A History of Dissonance

by LittleObsessions



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Angst and Feels, Dark, Episode: s02e25 Resolutions, Episode: s05e10 Counterpoint, F/M, Heavy Angst, Non-Linear Narrative, Resolution, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-09
Updated: 2016-08-09
Packaged: 2018-08-07 18:40:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7725487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleObsessions/pseuds/LittleObsessions
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"And he defies her - in a conversation he will never have with her and which will only ever exist in his own mind - to maintain that she's not permitted a violation so raw, she'll lose just a bit of herself for it. That's punishment, he thinks, for what you think you had to do.<br/>The devil has been here, but the question remains as to whether or not he's taken his leave."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A History of Dissonance

“The shattering of a heart when being broken is the loudest quiet ever.” **― Carroll Bryant**

 ** _Dissonance_** _n._ \- a simultaneous combination of tones conventionally accepted as being in a state of unrest and needing completion.

An unresolved, discordant chord or interval.

* * *

 

He scans the despairingly empty bridge as the turbo lift hisses open. He can only see the top of her head, hair gleaming in the haze of a red alert, and she's sitting in his chair. Still, unmoving. _His_ chair. It takes a moment to understand. 

The Devoran was clever, he'll grant him as much. He knows instantly, what that took, what it cost her.

Violation comes in many guises. He should know. 

And he defies her - in a conversation he will never have with her and which will only ever exist in his own mind - to maintain that she's not permitted a violation so raw, she'll lose just a bit of herself for it. That's punishment, he thinks, for what you think you had to do. 

The devil has been here, but the question remains as to whether or not he's taken his leave.

The silence slams into him, catching him between the ribs and winding him. It is deafening. There is nothing - not a clever word, a gentle admonishment, a smart joke - which will end this silence.

There's nothing left. 

She breaks it with her order, standing up, brushing off her uniform trousers for a moment.

"Commander, you have the bridge."

It's stupid to say there's a breeze, in their so overtly controlled environment, but as she brushes past him she creates one.

Warm, sweet...alien.

There's something on her skin that wasn't there before, or maybe it's been there a long time. He can't be sure. It sticks to her, this other darkness, catching in his throat and making him gag.

He doesn't need to know how far she went, but that doesn't mean he doesn't want to know.

The distinction is an unsettling one. And it's one he has no right to.

He almost reaches out to her, to grab the crook of her elbow with his fingers and stall her there. They'll be enfolded in the thick black of her uniform, he imagines, and they'll stop her.

He doesn't, he stands utterly motionless as she disappears into the lift. 

"Continue course Mr. Paris," he says, "Get us out of here."

Her heat, small, concentrated, lingers in his chair. He feels consumed by it.

He has no grasp, no true hold, on what she's becoming.

He watches the stars stream by, carrying them from one lurching realisation to another. Once, before they'd started leaving bits of themselves shattered across the Quadrant, he'd had a right to her.

Or at least she'd made him think so.

He reaches over, self-conscious of eyes that, he knows, are better occupied than to wonder at what the XO is doing, and grazes his fingers across the worn leather of the arm of her chair.

There's inches between their chairs, and it's a chasm.

He recalls, freshly, the way her fingers drip over the sides of it when she's at ease. It's been so long. Now more often than not, they drum, plastering out a staccato of sheer anxiety, against the surface of the chair.

He hates it. 

 

***

From the sanctuary he's built her, underneath the unimpeded stars, she sighs through darkness.

"This tub is glorious Chakotay."

He can hear the grin in her smile. His fingers stall, sand filtering through them, as he pictures her. His hands had grown tired, the stresses of carving the beautiful but tough, translucent pebble she'd found on the banks of their river today, straining them. He'll go back to it.

She's been labouring so physically he imagines her taking the sponge, squeezing it between her lean fingers, dripping it over her tense shoulders. He knows the tension in them because he feels it every night - her parameters don't extend to easing her pain - when he takes them under his hands.

Her skin is delicately warm.

Before he knows it he's standing in the doorway - there's nothing of the voyeur in him, or at least he never thought there was, until now - watching her, each stark relief against the moon tempting in its perfectness.

She’s drawn, set down, barriers he knows he can’t cross. It's not that she hasn't been inviting - the laughter, the flirty little comments, the openness of conversation, the sway of her hips - but she's also spoken clearly about what she cannot have.

It's never been, ever, about what either of them want.

He has to know. If they're to live out the rest of their lives here, then he has to understand what they'll become. 

He was half right, at least.

One pale, lean leg is propped up on the edge while she dribbles water from the sponge onto it. 

He's at the tub, knees pressed against the hewn edge, before he realises how bold this is.

How invasive it is.

She tips her head up slowly and her smile, while not seductive, is neither shy nor appalled. He'd describe it as enigmatic, if he was not so taken by the sight before him that he has lost all powers of cognisance. 

"Would you like to go inside?"

He's not sure if it's a reprimand, a gentle warning, a kind dismissal, or simply a question.

He's clever and astute, but he doesn't have the same command of language - or indeed politics - as she does. He isn't able to dress up things that are heavy with meaning as prettily as she is.

"I want you."

He says simply.

A smile slowly spreads across her face.

"I want you too."

Her bluntness surprises him, as does her willingness. Maybe it's the heaviness of the night flowers in the air, or the compelling moon, but she seems as infatuated as he is.

In one swift move his fingers delve into the bath, closing one hand around her hip and another around her neck. He scoops her from the water.

 

***

Anyone with the wherewithal to examine him, as he is now, would surely be concerned by the fact he's been sitting gently caressing the arm of the command chair for more than merely minutes. 

He's a fool, he knows it, but it doesn't make it any easier to swallow.

Chakotay has never been good at giving things up, or of letting go. That's his problem: his fingers are grasping at a long-ago withered ledge, reaching across a space so vast it makes the distance Voyager faces seem paltry.

That's his problem, he can't bare the prospect that he could give up when even a fraction of hope remains.

He's losing her in increments. It's not the Viddians, not the Borg, not even that smug Kashyk. He doesn't know who the enemy is any more.

This, as huge a concept as it is, terrifies him to paralysis.

 

***

She is glaringly confident, and it would send a lesser man running for the new hills on this new Earth. Not him. To him it's everything. It suits her perfectly. She loves immensely, and that has to extend to herself, and it’s evident in her confidence.

Languid breaths push through a lazy smile as she leans against the wall, glistening with bath water and oils still, one leg propped up against the wall so her hip is tilted and curves inwards. The image itself is nearly his undoing. Her hair is loosening, tumbling. It's mesmerising.  He wants to run his fingers through it. 

She's watching him watch her as he removes his own clothing methodically. 

This is a reveal that's been denied them too long, and he recognises her enjoyment in it as much as he feels his own. 

"You're beautiful."

It comes out of him as a breath, rather than words.

"So are you," she says earnestly.

"You're okay with this?"

He has to check. He has to know that this is more, that she wants this because she can have it, and not because it’s the only option available to her.

She pulls him towards her bed, and he watches in awe as she lies there before him. Her hand trembles as she reaches out and beckons him.

"I haven't wanted anything so badly," she whispers, "In so long. Come to bed."

 

***

He uses his override - the one he's only supposed to use in the event of Captain's incapacitation or death (the irony of the applicable metaphor isn't lost on him) - and enters her quarters. It is almost too dark, but eventually his eyes adjust.  She's sitting at her desk, eyes staring. Her knuckles are spread evenly out against the edge, whitening with pressure as she pushes down.

She's holding back the universe from caving in. 

The jealousy he felt, hot, stabbing, dissipates into the ether as she sits before him. He isn’t sure why it goes, but it seems petty. He has no right to it.

Perfect uniform. Perfect hair. 

He doesn't know how she does it. 

Or maybe he doesn't understand why. When it hurts this much, he can't understand why. 

 

***

He watches the fingers of both hands travel upward, curl at an awkward angle around the edges of the headboard he carved for her. There is power to be had in the knowledge that, under him, she will be so undone she might shatter his handiwork.

There is nothing on her lips. No jokes, no commands, no witty repartee.

It is simply his name. His. Only that. Moaned in three breathless, melodic syllables as she moves her hips frantically to meet his hand.

She comes undone and he is lost, and blinded, and made real all at once. The sound is music, a mixture of cries and gasps and delicious relief. 

Her fingers loosen, unhook, her breath evens out, and one hand comes to his cheek and the other to tap softly at the base of his spine. She nudges her leg out from under him so he's more readily between her thighs. He grasps her fingers on his face, pulls them back and presses a kiss to her warm palm.

"I'm in love with you Kathryn."

She kisses him then, takes the words into her own mouth and tastes the texture and weight of them.

She is pleased, and they pass her assessment. She regurgitates them anew against his awaiting lips.

"I love you Chakotay."

Home. A thought gathers at the nape of his neck, vague and comforting and very solid. It's so easy, so simple, to slide into her. Home, he thinks. Here. And her. 

 

***

The whiteness, the pressure of her anger, betrays her. Her anger is of an intensity he never thought possible. It’s a supernova, white-hot, blinding and consuming all at once. In the early days, while she wasn't renowned for her mellow temper, anger had only ever come on the heels of justifiable pains. Now it is permanent, a mutation of her make-up, which never leaves her. It has grown with her, and she with it. Its darkness, its sheer size, is tangible: filling out to the edges of her character. Darkening everything else she once was. 

Once, anger had only been a fraction of her: now it's everything. 

 

***

 

"You're very skilled, in bed, you know," she appraises lightly, kissing the juncture between his neck and his shoulder.

The formality of the comment is as funny as it is bizarre. He laughs, the sound filling their small cabin - sliding through to the other rooms.

"Make sure to file it on my record. I've had practise."

She smiles, feigns disappointment and slaps his chest playfully:

"I'm not your first?"

He laughs, "No. And I'm not yours."

"No," her face grows serious, "But I wouldn't do this. Not with a man I didn't love."

He smiles then, curls against her, locking their fingers together on her abdomen.

It's the easiest thing to believe, because he's felt how true it is. He doesn’t need to hear it to know it, because he’s watched it bloom in her.

 

***

Her anger, restrained - but just -, spills over as she lifts her head to look at him. Her face is dark with rage. Whatever this was supposed to be, this ritual, it was to be done alone. And he's ruined that with his intrusion. 

On the desk before her there is a bizarre collection of items: her copy of _Dante's Inferno_ , a lieutenant's rank badge, a pressed rose, an almost translucent, intricately carved stone.  Half-finished. 

He recognises the stone, then everything else falls into place.

They come to him in a list of predecessors: Mark. Justin. Me.

"Dismissed Commander."

A word has never been weightier, never carried so much subtext. Dismissal is her forte.

It's a shit move and, under any other circumstances, he'd obey her. But she's hurting, or something akin to pain, and he can't turn away from her.

That's his biggest fault. It's been his biggest fault for the last five years. 

"I know you're hurt-"

She laughs, and it is the sound of metal scraping on stone - rough, gritty, jarring. No humour. He winces.

"You had feelings for him-"

At this her palms lift off of the table, slam down to reverberate across its surface. Frantic and quick, she lifts a plain box from the side and scoops everything back into it as they rattle from her recent fury.  

She keeps them in a box, he observes, how Janeway of her. How perfectly fitting. 

She stands, brushes past him, and disappears into her bedroom. He finds a perverse comfort in knowing their relics lie inches from her as she sleeps, uninhibited.

Then he remembers she doesn’t sleep anymore.

She emerges again, the box gone. But she's still nursing her anger like an infant, cradled intimately to her. He can see it in the hard line of her shoulders, the way her jaw is set like iron - even more obvious now because of her shorn hair. He mourns her hair for a moment, as something symbolic of the spirit that's gone from her, as an impracticality he loved because it was _so_ impractical. He feels it threading weightily through his fingers, sees it falling over her shoulders to rustle across his chest. His skin aches with the miss of it. 

"Chakotay, go."

She has lost that fire that had raged a moment ago, but its kindling is still fresh in her eyes.

"He hurt you-"

She grimaces, then cuts through. 

"I'm not hurt. I'm disappointed."

He knows his confusion is clear on his own face, and he feels embarrassment rush through him. She laughs again, mocking, as he flounders.

"Disappointed?"

"Disappointed," she repeats slowly, as if his incompetence will be rectified if she says it like he's a child who needs patient explaining. 

 

 ***

 

"It's a quaint thing, don't you think?"

He opens one eye, looks down at her. The new sun on this, their new world, is just rising, wrapping its gilded blanket around them. She reaches for the glass of water at the side, takes a drink and holds it to his lips.

"What is?"

"The idea of making love," she continues, "Or at least, the phrase. The words. I used to hate them. I avoided saying them at all costs. Maybe it's my age, I don't know. But I think I...get it."

He takes the compliment for what it is, and he's humbled by it.

"Nothing to do with the man who likes making love to you?"

He smirks and she rolls her eyes.

She laughs that throaty, deep laugh. And then she watches as he slides down her body, kissing the pale skin as he goes. She folds her fingers with his on her sternum, her white, small hands a direct contrast to his. He loves her body, the way her hip bones jut out just a little,  the softness of her stomach, the way she's imperfect and all the more beautiful because of it.

"You make me feel like a goddess, Chakotay."

It's full of awe, a little shy, and entirely honest. And no woman has ever been more deserving of worship, and no man as willing to give it. 

 

***

He's not even asking for that now. He’s not asking for an act of worship. He's asking only that she doesn't feel this hatred, this guilt, this fury. He just wants her to feel something other than the anger which has become her.

She doesn't go back to her desk.

Instead she moves to the seating area, settling with her arm along the couch. She doesn't look at him.

"I don't understand."

She keeps her eyes dead-ahead, staring out into the streaking stars.

"Oh you know me better than that," she says, "I knew he was a snake from the moment he came aboard this - _my_ \- ship. I didn't have feelings for him. Apart from hatred."

What she says is partly true, he knows. But there's something else he hears, though she remains silent. He hears it in what she doesn't say as she tilts her head back, as if towards a bright sun that isn't there. He wants to rewind the clock, to take her dismissal and go. He can't hear this. He knows what’s coming like a wave, and he wants to turn and run. But she’d given him that chance, and he’d resisted it. Now he’ll suffer the exquisite pain of her honesty.

"I wanted to fuck him," she says simply, "And I don't even get that."

The profanity, the blunt crudity, the ice and heat that are both fighting for ground in her tone, leave him startled. It is like a blow to the gut and he reels back as if from a left-hook or a bucket of frozen water. 

"I don't even get that."

The repetition is a clawing sentiment.

The hint of something else under the demanding pragmatism of the assertion does nothing to ease his sudden terror.  Her bitter disappointment is stretching thinly over arrogance, and something else. 

 _God, what have you become,_ he thinks. Then he sees the exact same sentiment pass across her own face, only momentarily, before it flees. It’s a terrible thing to witness.

Bits of them, who they once were, are scattered across this dark space. He’s so terrified, he can’t even muster empathy for what she feels. He doesn’t know if he has the wiring to do that.

"He was here to destroy me, and to fuck me over," she continues, as if she's picking through a field of thorns with each word, "I wanted something in return."

You got it. He wants to say. You got Voyager out of here.

But that wasn't what she really wanted.

"I wanted to use him,” she stalls, and the next words seem to choke her, stalling in her mouth, “And I wanted to be used. I wanted a no strings, absolutely no risk of being anything other than fucking," she grinds out.

He doesn’t even miss a beat.

"Me."

 _God,_ he thinks to himself _, Chakotay, what are you doing?_

 

***

She whispers long into the quiet night. She tells him, shares herself with him, invites him into her childhood and her life. He tries to return the gesture - he has candour he's never had before. She sheds tears over his loss, over his life. He's humbled.

"So we stay," she whispers eventually, as they lay in the hot quiet of her bed, "We make a life."

He nods into her hair, "We make a life."

He feels her smile, rather than sees it. 

It's not what she always wanted, not the life either imagined, he knows, but it's only taken them three months to realise it's what they need. 

 

***

_Me._

He says it before he can really calculate what it will do. Hundreds of years ago, the people who discovered gun powder had no idea what they were doing. Fireworks or war. It's a delicate balance. And he knows they sometimes look the same.

The laugh comes again, higher this time, even more desperate.

"I can be that," he vows, desperation colouring his lie.

He wants to stuff the words back into his mouth but they pour out before he can swallow them.

She turns away, addresses the stars with words that are dripping with disdain.

“No you cannot.”

“You want no strings, I can give you that. I can be what you want.”

She suddenly leans forwards, hands braced against the edge of the viewer as if she’s bracing for impact. The softness of her words, the gentleness of them, nearly shatter him.

“It could never be that. Not with you.”

He realises then, what he’s done. What he’s doing to her, and what she’s done to him.

He’s deprived her of the man who knew her so intimately, once, he could sense her the moment she walked into a room. He’d loved her with a fierceness he’d never known before.

He doesn’t know if he still loves her, because he’s not sure if you can love someone you don’t know, but he still wants her. And the origins of his desperation rest there, in that sentiment.

Her utter humiliation is clear as she turns to him, and he’s amazed he hadn’t read it before. He suddenly understands what she’s done tonight; took the men she’d loved once - Justin, Mark, him, - and saw them for what they were to her. Locked them away. Put them in their box, safe, hidden. Held them up to a light she couldn’t bear to examine, and then stowed them away.

It’s part survival, and part self-immolation.

Then she’d separated what she’d wanted in the now from them, those men who had loved her. And men she had loved in return. She didn’t want an act of love, she hadn’t for a long time.

How cruel she was to herself, and how high her expectations were of her own nature, astounded him. If anyone was Kathryn Janeway’s tormentor, it wasn’t Kashyk, it wasn’t the Borg – it was her, herself.

She’d wanted something that would make her feel again. Feel. Anything. To be taken violently – perhaps even with a dubious will - against an unyielding bulkhead, pips flying, neck bitten, pants torn. The violence of it wounds Chakotay in a way he can’t imagine. Anything that isn’t anger, he imagines, or guilt or fear, is what she wants to feel. Anything that feels like nothing…she was looking for the feeling of nothing.

And the sheer size of it, each little orchestration and movement which has coalesced to bring them to this, overwhelms him.

“Please go Chakotay.”

“Kathryn-“

“Just leave.”

He won’t ever leave her, because that’s not something he’s capable of, but in the literal sense she needs to be alone.

He turns to go.

 

***

The silence in the Turbolift is deafening, worse even than those moments where they were pressed side by side in sick bay as their cure was administered. The happiness, the relief on the ship, is not theirs.  Theirs is a unique grief, a grief which was over before it even began.

The very denseness of the silence is swallowing them up in its magnitude. They don’t look at each other, and he’s so aware of her avoiding him, he can’t bring himself to even try. His fingers stretch out to touch hers, but then he pulls them away.

As they reach the bridge she sucks a breath in, then steps back out onto her natural habitat. For a moment he watches her go, and he’s made immobile by the utter grief that strikes him. He’s only been on this bridge in the before, in the time before Kathryn, and he doesn’t know how to be after it. He doesn’t know what to do.

He weakens as she turns, just for a moment, and the look she gives him will haunt him for the coming months, invading his sleep, destroying his peace.

She looks at him as if he’s a phantom. The pain on her face is mirrored in his body, in his heart which is coming apart. He feels it shattering in his chest, like glass or ice.

And he already knows what he is – a ghost receding into her past, floating into the realms of what she could have had.

If she hadn’t wanted this bridge more.

He feels himself disassembling.

 

 

 ***

 

He paces his quarters like a caged beast, appalled by what he offered, and broken that she didn’t take it.

He hates himself for what he just did, what he offered when he couldn’t possibly give it. More than that, he hates what she’s become.

What she’s willing to do in pursuit of her own realisation, and punishment, horrifies him.

And it’s this which makes bile rise into his throat. He hates her, and he doesn’t know when that happened.

He shouldn’t pity someone he loves, he shouldn’t hate her at the same time as he loves her and pities her. And yet all three of these emotions interplay, weave together across his soul, rending open the carefully sutured and stitched pieces of his heart.

She hasn’t been feeling for a long time, and it stuns him that he hasn’t been either. With the entrance of Kashyk into their life, these feelings have suddenly floored him. Maybe it was the music, but it could have just as equally been the silence. It doesn’t matter what the catalyst was, it only matters that Chakotay’s drowning again.

The door chimes, and he’s shocked when it’s her, and she strides in.

He really is.

“Does the offer still stand?”

He doesn’t even speak, just pushes her against the wall as the door slides closed beside them. He smells it on her skin, that cloying smell, that alien smell.

Here is where the lie begins, the entr’acte.

What he’s offering, and what she’s willing to take, will never match. So in this moment they’ll pretend to have come to some understanding, even though they are so far away from each other they might as well occupy other worlds, and he knows that. But something which feels like love, though it is furious and grieving, drives him. And want. He can’t deny that there is want in him.

She’s passive – and she’s so tired he expects nothing less – but the realisation of her submission is sore in and of itself. Then, he reminds himself, this isn’t the woman he once loved. This is someone else, in another time. And yet the feeling lingers, the feeling that somewhere in there is Kathryn. That he still loves her. That, if he can do this and make her believe, he can somehow get her back.

He’s a fool, and he knows it, but he’s a hopeful fool.

The fact that she’s too far gone, and he is too, is pushed into the back of his mind.

 There’s no fight as he pulls her pants away, sliding them down her legs and then lifting her and hooking them around his body. His fingers push her underwear to the side. When his lips slide across hers – red, dark, thin - she turns her face away, pressing it against the wall so he can’t kiss her. And a little bit of him dies. She fumbles for the clasp of his trousers, and he has to help her because she can’t quite manage.

It’s too soon, and she’s not ready, and neither of them really care about that. Her gasp of agony and his grunt of pain don’t even register. There is no sound that can register now. His hands ghost towards her hair, a habit formed so long ago, and all he encounters is air. He nearly weeps. Her listlessness doesn’t dissipate and it's then he realises what he’s reduced her to, and what he’s become.

As his fingers run over ribs he can count, and the concave of her stomach leaves only air where in contrast her pelvic bones jab painfully against his stomach, does he realise what this is.

He can’t do this. He doesn’t know why he ever thought he could.

“Let me take you to bed,” he grinds out against her jaw.

“No.”

For the first time she is participating. Her will has never been in question, but her presence was.

He stills his frantic, uncoordinated movements and holds her there.

“Please.”  
It’s a plea, he’s begging, and for the first time tonight he’s not embarrassed by it.

“No,” she pushes him away, the loss instant, and sliding down, bends to scoop her clothes up. “I needed this,” she says, wounded, “I needed you to do this for me.”

He reaches out to hold her, his fingers clutching at the air before her shoulders, but she steps away.

“I will…in bed,” he answers, “I will. I’ll-“

She stares at him, then begins pulling on her clothes. She’s dressed in seconds. He feels like he’s drowning, letting her go again. He knows that this will be it.

This time she doesn’t turn back to gift him any meaningful look.

“Good night.”

“Kathryn…“

It sounds like a prayer, and it’s been so long since he’s said her name like that, that it surprises even him.

She stalls on the threshold and turns. Recognition swims into her eyes, and that defiant bearing flees her.

It takes all of her energy, he can see, and everything she has left, to say it. She holds out those fine, tired hands to him.

“Take me to bed.”

 

He had thought the worst of it was over, that the most despairing discoveries had to have come to an end. But his heart shatters when she asks him to keep the lights off. She’d be fucked by some alien in the glaring white of the cargo bay, or the sharpness of the ready room, but she won’t let the man who loves her see her battle hardened body.

It kills him. It takes a bit of him he’ll never get back, with the bit of her she’ll never get back either.

He does as she asks. Grey, soft, forgiving light as he pulls back the sheets for her.

She doesn’t speak, not for hours.

He learns her again – though he quickly realises he never forgot – kissing the skin of her neck, the pale, sharp expanse of her collarbones. She lies still, shrinking into the mattress, jerking away from his gentle touch.  She pushes her head into the pillow, her face terrified and desperate all at once.

But she comes back to him, slowly, in increments that can’t be measured by the chronometer. There is capitulation when her fingers finally curl into his hair, and a soft sigh leaves her lips. He recognises it as a lingering memory of the woman she used to be. For the first time she’s willing, and she’s actually there with him. She’s not somewhere else, looking for punishment and retribution. He smiles against the skin of her shoulder.

Only then does he think it’s safe to kiss her. At first she tilts her chin away, but he softly rotates her face back to his. Her lips open slightly, readily.

 He kisses them away, that smug bastard Kashyk. Mark and Justin even. He wipes them from her, or imagines he’s doing it.

He wants to wipe everything she feels away, but leave it there too. So he just decides to do what he knows – and that’s to love her, no matter what. He doesn’t hate her, not all of her, and he doesn’t pity her, not all of her.

Mostly it's love, and even though it will be the end of him, he feels it as fully as it demands to be felt. Because he loves this woman as she is, even if she’s not the same woman he first fell in love with.

 

He’s not naïve enough to think he’s her saviour. There is nothing salvageable here, nothing which can be fixed.

The devil has been here, but the question remains as to whether or not he's taken his leave.

He won’t repair what’s lost to suffering, to grief, to hope and misery. But if he can make her feel, if he can remind her of who she once was – and who he once was – then it might mean something. They will pretend the dissonance can be repaired, that there is harmony to be found. Or they might even try to find each other again.

There is a flush on her cheeks now and, for the first time, she speaks against his mouth.  Her fingers curl around his, and there is a surprising strength to her hold on his hand. Her words are disbelieving, soft and shy.

“You make me feel like a goddess Chakotay.”

Tomorrow, on her bridge, they’ll pretend it never happened. And it might never happen again.

But a small voice, his own, at the nape of his neck, soft and comforting, whispers that it might.

And that’s enough for him.

 

**Author's Note:**

>  **Author’s note:** Ah, so this is very dark. Because that’s what I like to write. I love angst, unashamedly, but I do like a happy ending. Any reviews and, as equally, constructive critiques are very welcome. If not, I’d just love if you enjoy it.
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>  **Disclaimer:** These characters don’t belong to me, and nor does any reference or allusion to plots or idea that are recognisably Paramount’s or CBS’. I make no gain – monetary or otherwise - from writing these stories.
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